Art & poetry from the August 2023 issue of Tumbleweird

Sitting Silently in Agony and Anger

By Celeste Sylvester

sitting silently in agony and anger
sitting silently in agony and worry
my pounding head becomes my beating heart becomes even steps to a happier me

i’m sick
and i’m healthy
i’m healing
and i’m hurt
i’m alive
and i’m dead
i’m me
and everyone i’ve ever met

life is a cycle of pain and healing
again and again
all lessons if i choose.
i wish it was possible to feel nothing.
to eradicate and obliterate my life’s pain.
but i’d forget the feel of the sun,
that warms me skin to soul.

MARTYRDOM STARDOM

By Richard J Balog

Now is not the time to abandon or waste words on palliative yoga death breath, sardonic & tone deaf
Spinning webs of static poetry
Vocabulary of a McGowan smile
an decaying enameled doppelganger
A mangled mouth, a rotting sepulcher
Cocoons in silhouette silence, my back facing a mirror in reverse
What do you do when you're not pretty anymore?
& sing false falsehoods through holes in teeth
& my animalistic grayed face, roars
A hairy mask, clandestine, hiding an urgency, foreboding, entrenched within a long ago massacred smile
A strong scent, a fatalistic perfume of bruised orchids, smoldering beneath my nostrils
Weighed down by saturated malaise & malady smiles, uninterrupted
Spirits oozing from these frigid madhouse walls, brooding cadavers of dreams never seen
masked, washed out bloodstream nurturing a parlor of mausoleum flowers feeding me sour nectars from the bayou show, caustic air in recycled echoes
My flesh, green, flushed, flaccid parchment paper; archaic
Being splayed out before your feelings, a feast of vulnerable greed wanes
As I scrawl epitaphs & epilogues
w/clenched fists, knuckle bone white & bloodied
Shards of chipped pencils beneath fingertips, splinters
This macabre sanguine colored vowels, collisions of consonants pirouette upon cul-de-sacs of shadows
Scars of a million sorrows, the most beautiful of monsters, ghouls & seamless carcasses
Ink flowers bleeding words moaning from my bent pen
as warm as a wound
Seducing a amorphous moon, cold as a tomb
As are the lucid worms squirm
I taste the licorice on their luxurious breath
Sowing & reaping in acres & acres of wooden bones of misfortune & doubt
So sing, wail, wax & wane symmetrical demons from my nappy hair
Dancing w/these very days of decay & mnemonic tenets revealing a fatal second coming of phantom
receding seasons
This omnipresent nervousness, spreading upon my burning skull
O this crippling avalanche of hair!
Mocking, soaking up fragile vanities, tears & sweetened blood
Shredding down my cheek
Discolored & venomous saline Grey burlesque of broken follicular remnants, morose & weeping
Surrounding stinging anemones humiliations
Chaos & agonies dance behind this broken grin, infinite seizures & milky morass
My squirming tongue catastrophic speech, feeling, needing gasoline & oil for these phrases of glue & dread
O so troublesome!
Stitching upon rusted graffiti prose scarred on jailhouse desks
& it hurts to use my abandoned eyes, pupils empty & charred black, ink like in their miserly sight lessened visions
Never the arrow.......
.....always the blade
Concealing a fragile bell jar as a possessed ghost of Sylvia haunts me between the sheets & hidden, obscured by bloated pages of distal stanzas littered in blue magik
Sounds like a set up for martyrdom stardom
Whilst a dead sparrow dangles in the corner, the latest victim of SUGAR-SIDE

The Harvest

By Sarah Avenir

small children,
that field in which
we plant
our hopes —

don't we know
we should plant
our own fields, too?

one day,
they will become us
and there will be dry, cracked earth
instead of the harvest
we taught them
was theirs

MAIN IMAGE: Fernweh / Katie Baker